Potatoes are steamed, cut into pieces the size of a mouthful, coated in a flour batter and fried. Over them goes a sauce of miso cooked down slowly with sugar and mirin until it is thick enough to cling. Sweet and salty at the same time, and hot enough that the first one is a mistake. Some shops serve them on a skewer, three or four to a stick.

Chichibu has very little flat ground and has always relied on dry fields rather than paddies, which means potatoes rather than rice. The small potatoes from the harvest were roasted in the hearth and eaten with miso smeared on them, and that is where this begins. The large ones, presumably, were sold at market.

Farming households had a word for food like this: kojuhan, the small midday meal. It means whatever you eat between jobs, when you are hungry but it is not yet time to stop working and go inside. Not a meal. The thing that stands just before one.

It won a prefectural competition for this sort of food in 2009, and after that the name travelled well beyond the valley. What was eaten standing up at the edge of a field is now ordered by visitors who have come a long way and are sitting down to it.